After years of avoiding it like the plague, I’ve signed up for facebook. As a friend said recently, you’ve either got to be an early adopter, or get dragged in kicking and screaming once it’s past its prime: otherwise, you’re just a trendy bandwagoner. So, goal accomplished there.

It’s strange to get used to. I’ve got it locked down as much as reasonably possible for privacy reasons, but even then its tricky to manage. Try to play Mafia Wars for five minutes and it will desperately send out notices to your wall and all your friends about every damn thing, and all you can do is hope you hit the ‘undo’ button fast enough. You can’t tell it not to unless you don’t play. That’s kept my involvement in those sorts of games down.

There’s also the whole friending thing. I knew some friends would pop up, and plenty have. I’m glad to add them. But then there are assorted friends of friends: I have no clue who they are, though I’m aware of their connection to other friends. Do I add them? For the most part I haven’t. How about the one where I added one guy I sort of know, but ignored his wife’s request because I hate her? How does that get handled when she notices? The oddest bit came a few mornings ago when some old dude named Richard something sent me a friend request. I looked him up and it turns out he was one of the minor actors in Star Wars, the one who Vader choked on the Death Star. It seems he’s connected to a lot of the Legion folks and just saw me pop up, so he sent a request. I added him since he seems rather cool.

Then there’s the family thing. Lindsay has already added me, though I hadn’t wanted to add relatives to this thing. So notice ahead of time: other family related requests will be ignored. The sordid details (and spam) from my mafia wars connections isn’t something to drag the family into.

The spam from all the quizzes is killing me though. And they’re stupid quizzes too. Misspelled, pointless, a handful of useless questions arbitrarily attached to points values with a silly answer people look to to ‘describe’ themselves. I’m gonna make my own quiz, and after 50 questions everyone will get the same answer: you’re a trendy moron who feels the need to cover yourself with labels because god forbid you take charge of defining who you are for your damn self.